"To restore and conserve fish, wildlife and habitat throughout the state and teach others to do the same."

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Thursday, July 5, 2012

Return of the River Dancer

What You Otter Know About The Otter:

Otters are even more aquatic
than the mink discussed in the May-June issue, and have a variety of
specialized adaptations to help live in watery environments.These include webbed feet and a muscular tail
to enable them to catch most fish, long whiskers to help locate prey in dark
water, and dense brown fur and very high metabolism to stay warm in cold water.Otters are versatile eaters, and supplement
their normal fish diet with frogs, crayfish, waterfowl, turtles, small rodents,
and assorted other prey.

Otters are also much larger than
mink.A big male can weigh 30 pounds and
exceed four feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.Both sexes travel long distances along lakes
and streams foraging for food, and they sometimes also make long overland trips
between bodies of water.Otters are not
good diggers, and usually rely on burrows made by other animals or natural
hollows or beaver lodges for shelter.

Otters were originally found
throughout Michigan, but by the 1920s they were scarce in the Northern Lower
Peninsula and Upper Peninsula and probably gone from Southern Michigan.This led to a statewide ban on otter trapping
from 1925 through 1939 that caused an excellent population rebound in the
north.And limited taking after trapping
resumed has helped maintain healthy otter populations there.

However, the species is still
recovering in Southern Michigan, and the otter
that I saw in a DuckLake marsh in the summer
of 2001 seems to have been one of the first modern sightings in northern CalhounCounty.This was followed by a few more brief sightings, and then an outstanding
one on Christmas Day of 2007.Our
Christmas otter obviously felt secure on an ice shelf far out in DuckLake,
and dove for fish and ate its catches on the ice while several of us watched
through spotting scopes.It caught a
fish on every dive, and finally quit after catching and eating one that
appeared to be two feet long.

When I mentioned this sighting
to a conservation officer he said that the DNR
had been receiving otter reports from all across Southern
Michigan.This expansion
obviously included Clinton County because a trapper caught an otter in a mink trap
on the edge of the MWC’s Bengel Wildlife Center property in 2010.

The otters’ versatile diet and
roaming nature usually prevent them from seriously harming prey
populations.However, they can devastate
confined prey, as one did at the Palms Book State Park near Manistique in
2010.This otter ate every one of the
large trout that fascinate visitors to the Park’s Kitch-iti-kipi spring, and
then returned and cleaned them out again when the DNR
supplied new fish.I have not been back
to see the outcome, but members of the weasel family are notoriously hard to
deter by any means short of trapping.

Some otters reportedly also eat
muskrats and small beavers, and a fishing friend and I had an experience in
Ontario a few years ago that demonstrated how one beaver family felt about
them.We were fishing in a river when
several beavers slapped their tails in alarm and swam away from their nearby
lodge.Then four otter heads popped up
beside the lodge and showed us why the beaver had fled.

Otters can tread water with
their heads and upper bodies sticking up like mermaids, and these animals swam
within about 50 feet of our boat and observed us this way for several
minutes.They were obviously annoyed at
our presence, and clicked and chattered loudly throughout the inspection before
finally swimming away.

The literature is divided about
how much help (if any) male otters provide the females in raising young.While one situation does not prove anything,
this Ontario group consisted of two adult otters and two young ones, and they
all remained close together while they were observing us.

No article about otters would be
complete without mentioning their playful side.Numerous people have reported otters belly-sliding down snowy or muddy
slopes and then climbing back up the slope and doing it over and over
again.And both young and adult otters
have been observed pushing objects like stones and twigs around like toys.As a result, this intelligent animal is
sometimes referred to as the playful weasel as well as the aquatic one.